Abstract

Innovations are an essential factor of competition for manufacturing companies in technical industries. Patent information plays an important role within innovation‑processes and for human innovators working on innovations. Innovation‑processes support the combination of cross‑organisational spread information and resources from patent databases and digital libraries is necessary in order to gain profit for innovation experts. The central challenge is to overcome the current information deficit and to fulfil the information need of the experts in the innovation‑process. Classical information retrieval (IR) research has been dominated by the system‑oriented view in the past. A user formulates a query and then evaluates the elements found through the query according to their relevance. But this rather static setting does not always correspond to the communication and interaction needs of humans. IR systems should explicitly support also the cognitive abilities of the users in order to realize a dynamic dialogue between the user and the system. An information dialogue which does not only support an individual query but also the complete search process is necessary. Only in this way is it possible to satisfy an information need and support the innovation‑process. In this paper we present in detail three innovation scenarios to highlight the challenges of advanced information systems, query reusability and result visualisation. By defining the essential activities and conditions of a search task, it is possible to develop user interfaces which offer assistance in the form of a connection of dialogues. From this we derive the elementary information sets and activities in the next step. An example illustrates the applicability and utility of the innovation scenarios described and shows how the activities satisfy the user's information dialogue context. As part of the example we apply a cognitive walkthrough on a patent database. Aiming for an implementation of Daffodil‑System we will benefit from these results.